Getting the General Idea

>> AA Bronson, surviving member of Canada's premiere art collective, on AIDS, art and trauma

by MATTHEW HAYS

Undoubtedly one of the most vibrant, prolific and powerful artistic forces to emanate from the Canadian art scene has been the collective General Idea. Formed in 1969 by Jorge Zontal, Felix Partz and AA Bronson, the trio first gained notoriety with FILE Magazine, a publication they launched in '72 full of art and parody, which drew further attention when it prompted a lawsuit from the publishers of LIFE Magazine, who cleverly picked up on the mags' striking visual similarity. As well as the magazine, they launched an art store in Toronto which sold books and art and created the Miss General Idea Beauty Pageant. The Toronto-based Idea toured Europe and North America with their shows. In this period, General Idea became famous for their ironic and facetious take on the art world and the commercial game it had become.

Much of that changed when the AIDS crisis struck the gay and arts communities. General Idea produced profound and staggering installations about the epidemic and its effects. In 1987, they appropriated the famous "LOVE" painting of Robert Indiana and replaced those four letters with AIDS, for the now-famous logo that appeared on posters and campaigns around the world. In '91, their "One Day of AZT" displayed, in massive scale, the five pills that constituted the daily regimen of this medication. The stark piece was as thought-provoking as it was simple.

Typically, General Idea--their name is a nod to corporate nomenclature such as General Electric and General Motors--has created works that are decidedly ambiguous. Take "Fin de Siècle" (1990), in which three seals are set adrift on their own private ice flow. Some saw it as reflection of the isolation felt by the three artists; others saw it as an environmental statement.

General Idea was effectively struck down by AIDS itself, when two of its members, Zontal and Partz, died of the disease in '94. This week, its surviving member, Bronson, will speak about the illness and its effects upon General Idea at Concordia's ongoing, and most excellent, HIV/AIDS lecture series. The Mirror caught up with Bronson, who divides his time between Toronto and New York, at his Toronto home.

Mirror: General Idea became world renowned for your ability to work as a collective. I'm wondering, since the loss of your partners, what the transition was like, returning to working as a solo artist...

AA Bronson: They died in '94, so for quite a few years I didn't do anything, in terms of producing work, except to finish up a few projects we'd been working on before they died. And then as time goes by it's difficult to figure out when I started to work again. The problem for me was that I had already been doing General Idea for 26 years, and I didn't know how to do anything else, though I felt I should have been because General Idea didn't really exist anymore. I felt whatever I did it should be separate from what we were doing together.

At a certain point, I realized the only thing I had to start with was that experience of going through their deaths and that last time we spent together. The works that I began then were autobiographical. It was a means of processing everything and starting to move forward.

Love in the age of AIDS

M: The AIDS poster General Idea designed in '87, in which you co-opted Robert Indiana's "LOVE" painting, was quite controversial at the time, with some charging that it was devoid of a message. What are your reflections on the AIDS logo now, some 14 years later?

AA: I feel it did its work very well. The interesting thing is that most of the people who were critical at the time seem to have dropped that criticism. The logo was always accepted in Europe and Canada, but it was in the U.S. where it was criticized more. I think that was largely because AIDS was seen as a political problem in the U.S., whereas we were thinking of it largely as a medical problem. We were not participating in those politics. We weren't seeing ourselves as activists. We saw the work as being socially motivated, but activist would have been too strong a word. We weren't out to change any government policies, because we were working internationally and didn't see this in terms of any particular government. What we were trying to do was more of a public relations campaign for a disease. AIDS was a lot like cancer had been in the '60s, a shameful disease that was to be hidden. We wanted AIDS to be more publicly acknowledged. We saw the logo as a sort of virus itself, it would go out into the communications system and be beyond our control. That was what interested us about Indiana's image, was that it spun out of control beyond his say. The interesting thing about that was that people around the world knew that that image should say LOVE and not AIDS. Many of them didn't know it had even been a painting. But we wanted the AIDS image to work in the same way the LOVE image had.

Creating the open text

M: In a '91 interview in the Journal of Contemporary Art, you discussed the ambiguity of General Idea's work. In particular, the piece that you did with three seals on ice--the New York Times critic Roberta Smith read it as about the fur debate. Are you ever irritated, like some artists, by misconceptions of your work, or do you find these variations in interpretation invigorating?

AA: We always found it interesting. Our ideas were attempts to pack as many layers of meaning into a work; then it could communicate to different people from different backgrounds and countries. I think that was an odd one, because she thought the seals were made of rabbit fur. But it's true, our work has been interpreted in many different ways. Including the AIDS logo. That debate was a good one to have, even if we didn't intend it.

M: In a discussion of FILE Magazine, you use words like "parasitic," and talk about the ways in which you were using the instantly recognizable mainstream LIFE Magazine format to put your alternative message across. By disguising the alternative as mainstream, you said, you were attempting "to occupy territories staked out by that mainstream magazine." How has this sort of occupation changed, now that so much of the alternative has been co-opted and swallowed up by the mainstream?

AA: I don't think it's been completely appropriated. I think things have been fragmented into a thousand different scenes. The mainstream culture constantly grabbing the most visible aspects of it and marketing them. Even the special interest audience is a big audience. The processes of manufacturing and producing can be done in a much more targeted way. But I don't really see that alternative culture is gone, things have just become much more integrated. I'm not even sure we have a mainstream culture anymore, but I suppose we must, because people make reference to it all the time.

M: I was very struck by your "Felix, June 5, 1994," the photo you took of your partner, hours after his death. I'm wondering what your thoughts of the famous Benetton ad were, the one that featured an image of an emaciated PWA.

AA: I knew about those ads when I did the Felix piece. That Benetton image was an advertising image, not a personal one. It was also referencing Christ, that that was supposed to be the face of Christ. Who knows, because who knows what Christ looks like. I was aware that my piece could be seen as a repetition of that but at the same time they're completely different. I decided to go ahead with it anyway. I saw it as in opposition to the Benetton ad.

M: Were you offended by the Benetton ad? On the one hand you could see it as a way of raising awareness of the illness, on the other it was crassly commodifying AIDS.

AA: I was of two minds about it to tell you the truth. I've never been able to come to a decision. I have to respect the ad people for coming up with a campaign which it was impossible to come up with a clear judgment about. Talk about ambiguities. Impossible to tell how cynical that was or how caring it was. I guess it's in bad taste in a way, but maybe it did some good along the way too.

The effects of 9/11

M: I think it's safe to say that the trauma the gay community suffered throughout the AIDS crisis has shaped the way we've seen things and has informed our culture and outlook, including the work of General Idea. I think it's also safe to say that the events of September 11 have now created a collective sense of trauma in the West, as witnessed via CNN. What do you think the effects of this trauma will be on our culture?

AA: I live part of the time in New York. I was actually on a 9 a.m. flight that morning, but didn't make it back because the flight was cancelled. In New York it hasn't been a CNN thing. Part of the brilliant thing about the attack was that everyone starts work at 9 a.m. there, unlike Toronto where people seem to have more flexible hours. Everybody was on the street at 8:45 p.m. It was a very public event. Almost everyone I know saw either plane strike the buildings or the buildings collapse, or all of them. The trauma is quite palpable in New York. It's difficult to describe, but it's different than everywhere else. It's not about fear of the future, but rather about what's happened. This might just be nothing at all, but the weird thing is that New Yorkers are very polite and nice to each other.

There's this whole thing about how Americans now have to toe the line. Susan Sontag has taken heat for what she wrote in The New Yorker. But in New York I feel that's much less so, because that's where it really happened. Because it's the center for media and art I think it's going to have a huge impact, but it's very hard to tell what that impact might be. To me, this is still very mysterious.

AA Bronson will give his lecture, "AIDS/ART/BODIES," on Thursday, Nov. 1 at 6 p.m. at the Hall Building (1455 de Maisonneuve W.), as part of the Concordia Community Lecture Series on HIV/AIDS. Admission is free.